


Remember That You Will Die

by Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Banter, Brother Feels, Canonical Character Death, Death, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Men of Letters Bunker, Original Character(s), POV Alternating, POV Dean Winchester, POV Outsider, POV Sam Winchester, Photography, Post-Series, Season/Series 09, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-22 05:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2496242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone took a sharp tool and carved that word into the lid of this box. Winchester. No date or place or indication of its contents. It’s the only word here, except one: <i>Chevrolet</i> in chrome letters on the hood of the car one of ’em is draped across in one of the photos, bleeding, the blood a bright silver-black.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember That You Will Die

Sam died. Again.

He couldn’t remember which death this was, where he was in the timeline of his life. Had he been to Stanford yet, or hell? What about heaven, or the Roadhouse? 

This time, as every time, he was sure he would never return. Yet this time, unlike other times, he wondered if he might.

Because Dean stood over his bed in the bunker, and he heard the click of the shutter.

* * * 

Sam glanced up as Dean came into the room, mumbling to himself. “You’re never gonna be able to get those pictures developed, you know. I doubt they’d turn out, anyway.”

Dean scowled at him, turning the antique camera over in his hands. What was the accordion thing for, anyway? He guessed it was for moving the lens in and out, like a really old-school zoom. “Why not?” he asked. “I found some film and put it in. I can just take it to the photo-mat—”

“You mean the drive-through kind. Like Dad used to use sometimes. When was the last time you saw one of those?”

Dean tilted his head, thinking. “Guess it’s been awhile.”

“That’s because they don’t exist anymore. Everything’s digital. You’d have to look pretty hard to find a place that develops film anymore. And I doubt there’s any place at all that would know what to do with that—there probably hasn’t been for decades. It’s not 35 millimeter, I’m pretty sure. Some sort of medium format, not to mention black and white.”

“Awww, this is a black and white camera? Figures. It looks pretty old.”

“It’s the film that’s black and white, not the camera,” Sam answered absently. He shut his laptop and turned his full attention on Dean. “Let me see it,” he said, and sat forward as Dean handed it to him. “Do you have the box for the film you used?”

* * * 

In the end, Dean had a new hobby.

Sam had been right that there was no place to develop the film he’d found in the same back room of the bunker where he’d found the camera. Several cameras, actually, mostly big heavy things, with the tripods they were supposed to be mounted on stacked against the wall and gathering dust and spider webs. Large format, Sam said. Dean couldn’t imagine what picture would be worth lugging those hulking things around. Heavier than his biggest shotgun and all the rock-salt cartridges he could need.

Sam seemed to think the same thing of the camera Dean had chosen, one of the smallest ones. It was heavy, and certainly took up more space than his phone. 

But the pictures—there was something about them. There was something, especially, about watching them emerge from the gray cloud in the developer tray in the darkroom, under the dim orange glow from the darkroom safelights. Like ghosts, but not the kind he had to salt and burn. The kind that came back to life.

Sam wasn’t dead anymore—not really. He’d been dead, and Dean took a picture at the exact moment Cas brought him back. It was a little weird—he knew that. He should be freaking out about his little brother dying, desperate to bring him back, shouting at Cas to hurry. And he was. But there was also this.

The camera brought Sam back, or at least, it felt like it had. Sam was back, but in another way, he was still gone, as gone as he had been since Dean accepted the Mark, or since Dean got back from Purgatory, or ... when did that happen, exactly? There was one place he could always have him, though: in two dimensions, in the dark room, when he was all alone—more with him than he’d been in so long. 

It wasn’t just the camera that brought him back. So did the film on the little hamster-wheel-looking thing Dean had learned to wind it onto in total darkness, the stainless-steel tank he poured the chemicals into, the big, dusty old enlarger that projected Sam’s face in negative onto the mustard-yellow, metal paper-holder. The photo paper in the pool of developer, with its acrid scent, chemical yet still organic, making the air thick and warm and smelling just a bit sweet at times, like a hint of decay. 

Sam hadn’t thought he could do it, Dean knew. But it was simple really. Shutter speed and aperture. Light and motion. He’d figured out what the numbers on the camera and the numbers on the film (its speed) meant. Same with the old, clicking timer on the enlarger. Making the prints was easy as long as all the numbers were right before it went in the tray, then it was just 90 seconds in the developer, 30 in the stop, 5 minutes in the fix, 10 minutes to wash. Then rinse it in that flow stuff that made it squeegee off clean, and hang it to dry.

Then Sam was there with him, in the orange light that was the only light Dean could seem to tolerate these days. Having ruined a roll of film he’d shot, and a whole box of photo paper, by exposing them to what had seemed like very small amounts of ordinary light, Dean had come to think of light as poison. He had dreams where the sun touched him and turned him black, killed him, and Sam wept over him, bathed in bright light like some Jesus painting. Only Sam’s tears seemed unreal once Dean woke.

That was the only way Sam was with Dean these days, in the occasional dream or nightmare or here in the darkroom, his face emerging under the liquid, usually too light or too dark at first, until Dean got better. This was the only way Dean could think of to bring him back.

* * * 

Sam was trying to come back, for Dean, because Dean needed that. He wished he could really be here, rather than wandering the halls of the bunker like a ghost, closing the door in Dean’s face or having it closed in his, saying words he wished he could take back and hearing those that should never have been spoken. Knowing what he never wanted to know.

He forgave Dean, but Dean would never forgive him. Or maybe it was that Dean could never forgive himself, and neither could Sam. For still being here, and not really being here.

He thought the photos would help him come back. Dean had surprised him. He’d figured out the whole process, start to finish, with help from the internet. They’d found the room with all the old cameras, and off that, a darkroom with an enlarger, trays, the big deep sink, the whole works. Dean had figured it all out and put it back together. The light blue, bubble-shaped refrigerator in the room with the cameras was plugged in and, miraculously, still running after God knew how many years. It held film, photo chemicals and photo paper, perfectly preserved. Sam hadn’t expected it to develop correctly, but after several mistrials, Dean had some beautiful, crisp photos.

Photos of Sam, dead or dying or resurrected.

“Well, if you’re going to do the memento mori thing, you picked a weird way to do it,” said Sam, walking into the print-drying room Dean had set up.

“Picked the right way, you mean. Who else dies as often as we do? By the way, yours came out fine.” 

He gestured to a row of photos of Dean, drying on the line Dean had strung across the room, in among those of Sam. His brother really was photogenic, Sam thought. It was weird, seeing him in Calvin Klein-style black and white like this. If they’d lived a different life, maybe Dean could have been a model. Even smirking at Sam past a beer bottle, his eyes had that haunted look photographers loved.

Dean hadn’t died since he’d taken up his new hobby, but had insisted Sam learn how to use the new camera so he could record Dean’s next return from the dead when it happened. “For future legacies, if there are any,” Dean said. “They should know we were here.” What we sacrificed, Sam heard.

“This one’s nice,” Sam said drily, pointing to a shot of Dean picking his nose.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “Workin’ on my poses. I call that one the gold-digger.”

* * * 

Shopping for junk. People say there’s nothing worth having at these old rummage sales, but I can’t agree. I always find something. With all the technology—no one left alive who didn’t grow up with the internet and smart phones and anything they wanted they just ordered, if they had money anyway—well, you’d think no one would go to these anymore. But they do. And I sure do. Estate sales, flea markets, even weird little shops in foreign countries where you don’t know what you’re buying and there’s no common language you can use to ask. Heck, if I ever make it to Morocco (probably won’t—I’m getting old now) you bet I’ll hit all the souks. Junk shops, yard sales, church rummage fundraisers… I’ve been to all of ’em, and found something—that _one thing,_ I know it when I see it—that I needed.

Oh, look. Here it is.

* * * 

Sam clutched Dean to him, sobs wracking both their bodies, his tears soaking Dean’s shirt. Lost, again. Too late, again. Dean was dead, again. His blood soaked through Sam’s shirt, already cooling against his belly.

He had been wrong. He wanted a respite, an ending, for Dean, as he had wanted it for himself. He didn’t want to drag his brother back into this world both of them hated, into this never-ending cycle of fight and hate and despair. His brother, whom he loved despite all that was broken between them, had loved since before he could remember and long after he died, every time. He’d thought he could let him go, to the peace that he’d earned.

He couldn’t.

Besides, he reflected as Dean’s sleeve fell open to reveal the Mark when Sam picked him up, he doubted that peace was what lay beyond this world for Dean, even if he could let him go.

As he settled Dean’s body on the bed, shaking with determination to get hold of Crowley and _make_ him give Dean back to him, he saw the camera on Dean’s bedside table. Though it sickened him, though it seemed furthest from anything he’d ever do, he knew what Dean would want. 

With trembling hands he tried to focus the lens on the battered, bloodied form of his brother.

And took the picture.

* * * 

I got the box open with a little finagling. The photos inside are black and white. You just don’t see that anymore, so that’s treasure enough, but these photos are something more. Something like my greatest find ever.

I always wonder who owned these treasures I find, and whether it was death or something more that made them leave such things behind. Such _things._ I shouldn’t say that. Themselves, more like.

Who were they? Handsome fellows, and young. Getting older in these photos—you can see the years go by—but never old. They never grow old, though they do die. Or maybe they pretend to—they’re so often bruised, battered, and bloody, maybe they were play-actors, messing with make-up and effects. Maybe it was some weird art project. But it doesn’t feel like that—not at all. It really looks like no one’s home. 

But then they’re there again, older. Sometimes one, the angry one with short hair and the face of a heartbreaker. Sometimes the other, very tall with longer hair and the most haunted eyes I’ve ever seen—the eyes of an animal always trying to escape its cage, but knowing it never would.

Winchester. It’s the only word here; there are no others anywhere, except one: _Chevrolet_ in chrome letters on the hood of the car one of ’em is draped across, bleeding, the blood a bright silver-black. It’s anachronistic, that car. 

Older than the times. Older than these fellows, but better cared-for.

Someone took a sharp tool and carved that word into the lid of this box. Winchester. No date or place or indication of its contents. The photos are discoloring with age in a way I’ve rarely seen, and which goes with a much older time. Splotches on the back, and the borders different sizes with the picture bleeding through in places—these aren’t ordinary photos. Or ordinary people.

Whoever they were, these Winchesters, they’re coming home with me now. For good.

~The End~

**Author's Note:**

> Written for  the Supernatural Summergen 2014 challenge on LiveJournal. I spent years doing the kind of darkroom photography Dean learns in this fic. Nothing will ever replace that for me. Writing about it was a wonderful nostalgic joy.


End file.
